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Talk:F-5 Freedom Fighter/@comment-77.248.1.2-20140712160155/@comment-4391208-20140713015325
Early TSFs were not very good in melee (compared to their later generation counterparts) anyways. The F-5 does have the advantage due to its design, but I wonder; the J-8 and MiG-21, both being TSFs that have seen extensive combat use in both range and CQC, take from the F-4 line. Since the F-4 was a well-armored TSF, stripping off excess armor would allow it to gain a much-needed speed increase, while retaining its high specs. The only F-5 variant that can be compared to later F-4s is the F-5E ADV, and even that's a 1.5 generation unit. The Mirage 2000 isn't a modification of an F-5; it's a rebuild from the ground-up. You notice that unlike the direct variants of the F-5, the Mirage 2000 drops the "F-5" from its designation, and actually goes through successive improvements; the developers were actually aiming to hit quasi-third generation with the latest Mirage 2000 variant. In this case I'd consider the base Mirage 2000 more of an independent early-production unit that caught up to the F-16 (like the case of the F-15A/B to F-15C/D), than thinking of it as a direct relation of the F-5 line. The thing is that just because the F-5 is more nimble doesn't mean that it's faster. No doubt the F-5's advantage is in close combat maneuvering, but the F-4 is hardly a lumbering beast in comparison. Not in their TSF versions, anyways, since, in the end, if the Empire had adopted the F-5, their upgrades would still be geared towards meeting their specified goals. Just because the F-5 had a better close-combat performance doesn't mean that you'll get a machine with even better CQC capability than an F-4; even if mechanical development could be quantized as giving some engineers a couple of stat points and telling them to add them into the base machine (it hardly is that easy, but it's the closest simple analogue), it just means that you'll spend less on trying to hit its project-stipulated CQC parameters, which would be offset by having those leftover funds and efforts be geared towards improving the operation range and overall performance of the theoretical F-5J because in the case of a modification project, there are goals to fulfill; it cannot even be reliably said that the F-5 will still retain its cost-efficiency after all the modifications, nor does the F-5 have similar operation parameters to the F-4. Japan does run long-ranged combat operations, not just at Korea, but also at Sakhalin, and regions further out; they were always looking westwards at the BETA advance, even though their first instance of combat was in 1992, a long time after the F-4 had dropped to a secondary role in other places around the world. Even when the F-16 entered production, the nation that jumped at the chance to modify the design for domestic use was Israel and China; Japan just went to buy F-15Js instead, once again repeating the F-4/F-5 parallel. The first time it could be explained that Japan didn't want to cancel its F-4 order after having placed it, and the F-5 came out only after 1974, but the second time with the F-16 seemed more or less an indicator that some reason or another, the F-5 and its derivatives did not catch Japan's interest; the F-15 came out in 1984, the F-16 in 1986, and Japan did not adopt the F-15J until 1989; they had plenty of time to consider their options, since they were developing their own TSFs at that time. The Japanese did not really need the CQC-specced TSFs of other nations; what they wanted was the manufacturing and development techniques other nations had used to create TSFs that could fit the base requirements of their envisioned TSFs. - Besides, if they really wanted to follow historical parallel accuracies with it, Muv-Luv would have went with the Empire first purchasing the F-4 and realizing its lack of CQC capabilities, before buying a force of T-38s, and, with some minimal help from the French, both nations united in their trait of unnecessary independent development, studying them to make the first F-1 Kaizens to supplement their F-4s. Following that, once again they would buy F-15Js, and use their experience in the F-1 to collaborate with the USA to modify the F-16 into the F-2. That is, of course, assuming that they wanted to parallel the history of post-WWII Japanese aerospace...